Annotated Bibliography
1. Annekevk. (2008). Teaching World History through Popular Culture.
Retrieved from:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Jba5HsWDsA
This video explains the use of pop culture points. Pop culture points are a way for students to earn extra credit just for watching their favorite TV show or listening to their favorite musical artists. A pop culture point is a reference that is found in any aspect of popular culture and is related to the content being taught. Song titles and Lyrics, TV shows, new articles, paper clipping etc. All qualify as pop culture points. This encourages students to be thinking about what they are leaning in school while watching TV etc.
2. Bauerlein, Mark. (2008). The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30). New York, NY, USA: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin.
This book describes “how a whole generation of youth are being dumbed down by their aversion to reading anything of substance and their addiction to digital “crap” via social media.” From his experience as a teacher the author writes about how students reading habits and general knowledge levels have reduced dramatically. He blames pop culture for negatively impacting the lives of young people by making them less intelligent. He goes to say that technology should make young adults more intellectual but instead is not and that this correlates to a scary future and the demise of American culture.
3. Buckingham, David. (2003). Defining the field. In Media education: Literacy, learning and contemporary culture (pp. 53-69). Cambridge: Polity Press.
This chapter indicates several general principles which characterize good practice in media education. Buckingham confronts teachers and parents’ contempt for the tastes and interests of youth and states that such condescension is counter-productive. He implies that all good teachers regard students’ interests and not assume students are unknowing victims of hegemony hidden in media. Good practice entails encourages students to reach their own conclusions regarding media influence rather than imposing predetermined views. The chapter contains examples that put the key concepts into practice.
“Media representations therefore inevitably invite us to see the world in some particular ways and not others. They are bound to be ‘biased’ rather than ‘objective’. However, this is not to imply that they are therefore deceiving audiences into mistaking representations for reality: as I have indicated, audiences also compare media with their own experiences, and make judgements about how ‘realistic’ they are, and hence how far they can be trusted.“
4. Buckingham, David, & Sefton-Green, Julian. (2003). Gotta catch ‘em all: Structure, agency and pedagogy in children’s media culture. Media, Culture & Society, 25(3), 379-400.
This article looks at what and how children might be learning from popular culture. The article specifically looks at the phenomenon Pokémon. “Pokémon is a media franchise owned by The Pokémon Company, and created by Satoshi Tajiri in 1996. It is centered around fictional creatures called “Pokémon”, which humans capture and train to fight each other for sport. The franchise began as a pair of video games for the original Game Boy, developed by Game Freak and published by Nintendo. The franchise now spans video games, trading card games, animated television shows and movies, comic books, and toys. Pokémon is the second-most successful and lucrative video game-based media franchise in the world, behind only Nintendo’s Mario franchise.“ (Wikipedia, 2015). The articles look at structure and agency; whether children have the ability to affect their own destinies. The article examines whether young people are capable of eluding commercial culture.
5. Duncan-Andrade, Jeffrey M. R. (2004). Your Best Friend or Your Worst Enemy: Youth Popular Culture, Pedagogy, and Curriculum in Urban Classrooms. The Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies. 26:313–337.
“This article discusses the potential of youth popular culture to create an engaging and empowering twenty-first-century curriculum in schools. Specifically, the paper investigates three key questions around the issue of developing a culturally relevant curriculum for students traditionally disenfranchised by U.S. schools: 1) What popular cultural literacies are urban youth investing themselves in? 2) Why are they investing themselves in these areas? and 3) How can schools more effectively incorporate those literacies into the school culture? The paper begins with the proposition that teachers should make better use of their access to youth cultural interests. Next, the paper draws on education theory and interviews with students from an urban high school to examine the relevance of youth popular culture to curricular design. The paper concludes with a call for educators to build on the momentum of the 1980s multicultural education movement by developing pedagogical strategies and curricula that draw on youth cultural literacies. Ultimately, this paper aims to synthesize data and theory as a means of discussing promising ways to teach urban students. “
“With the growing pervasiveness and persuasiveness of twenty-first-century youth culture, most particularly the media (television, music, video games, movies, magazines), traditional school curriculum, coupled with traditional pedagogies, stand little chance of capturing the hearts and minds of young people.“
6. Duncan-Andrade, Jeffrey M. R. & Morrell, Ernest. (2005). Turn Up That Radio, Teacher: Popular Cultural Pedagogy in New Century Urban Schools. Journal of School Leadership ,Volume 15.
“Synthesizing literature from critical pedagogy, sociocultural psychology, and cultural studies with popular cultural texts and experiences from actual classroom practice, this article conceptualizes the critical teaching of popular culture as a viable strategy to increase academic and critical literacies in urban secondary classrooms. Relying on scholarship that views youth popular culture as a powerful, but oftentimes underutilized point of intervention for schools, we discuss the impact of using youth popular culture to reconnect with otherwise disenfranchised schooling populations. We rebut criticisms associated with the teaching of popular culture by showing how teachers can simultaneously honor and draw upon the sociocultural practices of their students while also adhering to state and national standards. Further, the article demonstrates the social relevance, academic worthiness, and intellectual merit of hip-hop artists such as the controversial Eminem and popular film texts such as The Godfather trilogy (Coppola 1972, 1974, 1990). The article concludes with a call for postmodern critical educational leaders—vigilant advocates for students who are willing to combine academic content knowledge with a commitment to an engaging multicultural curricula. “
7. Genius Media Group, Inc. (2015). Science Genius.
Retrieved from:
http://genius.com/artists/Science-geniuses
This webpage contains many science teaching resources that utilize popular music to connect with students and teach science themes.
“Now that hip hop has become the single most dominant cultural touchstone in the lives of most youth, Chris Edmin, Rap Genius and I have come together to sponsor Science Genius. We chose hip hop as an art form to educate the listeners about scientific topics. As I said before I am not a science teacher. I go into classrooms as an artist and provide a model for students to communicate the information learned from their science teachers.”
8. Stack, Michelle, & Kelly, Deirdre M. (2006). The popular media, education, and resistance. Canadian Journal of Education, 29(1), 5-26.
This article explores strategies for engaging with popular media, critiquing it, and finding counter narratives. Stack & Kelly say that “youth spend more time with media than any other institution. “ The article concludes that educators should provide space for learners to critique and resist popular media. Since children and youth are the most prolific users of new media education on media should be compulsory. Educators must give students tools on what, how and why media reports on and attempt to get multiple resistant analyses and viewpoints into mainstream circulation.
9. Weedon, Tim. (2015). Exploring Popular Culture in Education. Development Education. Ie.
Retrieved From:
http://www.developmenteducation.ie/teachers-and-educators/exploring-popular-culture-in-education/
This website provides resources and educational strategies on core components of education. The section for educators and teachers is designed to facilitate exploration on human rights issues. The module on pop culture provides exercises that can be used to support and motivate students to engage with popular music and lyrics to exploring various issues concerning young people.
“In this module, I explore music, in particular hip-hop music, in education and suggest that using popular music approaches designed to add, supplement and encourage meaning, needs to relate to young people’s contextual experiences – their daily life experiences outside of their formal/vocational educational structures however challenging this may be for the educator.”
Other Youth Culture and media scholars: Henry Giroux, David Buckingham, Ellen Seiter, Stephen Kline, Shauna Pomerantz, Robin D.G. Keley.